XL/XE Podcast – Ghostbusters & Seven Cities of Gold

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Adam and Bob are back and discussing some of my favourite games! The guys are laugh out loud funny as usual *Note: not all the language is PG rated* as they reminisce and replay some of the best games on the Atari. This time they cover the iffy politics of Seven Cities of Gold while they enjoy butchering natives, get confused and lost in Hacker (Probably a loose Phlamson Joint) and defeat Mr Stay Puft in Ghostbusters. Download from anywhere good podcasts are brewed.

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Into the Vertical Blank Podcast S2 E1:

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The Into the Vertical Blank Podcast is back for a new season (and with a new logo!), this time Jeff and Steve bring their unique podcasting style and banter to focus on the Atari classic “Food Fight” and specifically why it hasn’t appeared on any of the Atari retro game collections and includes an in depth interview with Jonathan Hurd, creator on the Food Fight arcade game for GCC and Atari.

Head on over to 8-Bit Rocket to get the show notes and have a listen, or if you’re a seasoned podcast listener, download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Renderific, the SVG Renderer

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Kevin Savetz has been working on a Renderer for SVG files in Turbo BASIC. In a remarkably short time he has gone from simple lines to the results below.

Starting with simple rectangles, he has gone on to add Circles, Ellipses, Lines, PolyLines, Polygons, Scaling, Paths, Subpaths, Curves and Polybéziers. I’m sure we are all anxiously awaiting the Fill routine.

You can follow along with the progress and offer words of encouragement on Twitter here.

Update: “Renderific” Has been released. There is now a topic for it on AtariAge here

Renderific on GitHub
Renderific 1.0Download

The Atari Accountant

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The Atari Accountant series of software was said not to exist. Mentioned only in a few adverts from 1981, some promo materials and a couple of people talking about the 1980 CES where it was announced. This fabled software came in three modules, General Accounting, Accounts Receivable, and Inventory Control each to retail for $500 and required a new double density, twin drive device, also announced at the same show, called the Atari 815 that would cost an additional $1200, an Atari 850 interface module and an Atari 825 printer!

The “Ill Fated” Atari 815

Bill Lange over at ATARI 8-bit Ads did a lot of research into the Atari Accountant at the end of last year, starting with a mention of it in the Atari Bean Counter Ad from September 1980 which is well worth the time required to read it. Bill mentions that only a few copies of this expensive and short lived product are known to exist and that the software has never been archived.

Curt Vendel the famed Atari archivist and founder of the Atari Museum mentioned that he had a copy of the Atari Accountant he found while dumpster diving behind some of Atari’s buildings in Sunnyvale and loaned it to Kevin Savetz who scanned all the documents and with the technical input from experts on AtariAge, archived the disks which sadly had some bad sectors on them. Fortunately there were two copies of the disks and a complete copy was patched together from the dumps.

The Atari Accountant, Minimum System Requirements!

These disks wouldn’t work in any drive except the Atari 815 so DjayBee from AtariAge cracked the protection and produced new images that could be used in any drive.

Roland Wassenberg (luckybuck on AtariAge) has done a painstaking job of collecting all the information together and presenting it on the Atari Wiki, this entry is still growing as more information becomes available.

So there we are. After 38 years and the efforts of an international group of people, the generous donation of extremely rare software, and the careful archiving of same, we now have a working copy of The Atari Accountant, with full documentation, preserved for the future.

I’ve included a link here to a download of the original and patched software and the scanned documentation.

The Atari Accountant (44MB)Download

ANTIC Episode 57 – Atari Pascal

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The guys at the Antic podcast are back, this time with, special guest Bill Lange, this month they are focussing on Atari Pascal as well as covering all the latest Atari news (I get three mentions… Whoa! Thanks guys!)

Your morning commute just got a little bit more interesting so grab the latest episode from the website or wherever you subscribe to podcasts

SillyPack 2k18

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SILLY VENTURE 2018                 ____              _____
    _____  __ 8-BIT RESULTS PACK___\  /___      _____|   |
  _/  __/__\/____  ____ ____  __\_  \/   /____ _\    |   |____._ ______ ______
_\_____  \  |  /__|  /_\   \/   /      / _  /   \   |  __/   | \  __  \  _  /
|   \/   /  | /   \ /   \_    _/ \    /  \_/ \ \    |  /  \     \ \/__/_ \_/ \
|_______/___|_____/_____/|____|   \  /\______/__\___|_____/_____/_/\___/_____/
!NE7        ___________     _______\/__

15 bonuses -  5 musics - 15 graphics - 13 intros - 6 demos - 4 games - 2 wilds

This pack contains a disk image in MyDos format with all Atari 8-bit releases of SillyVenture 2k18. I felt they deserve a good presentation, especially the graphics and music releases for which no art pack/music disk exists.

This pack comes with results viewer which also acts as a menu from where you can directly start all releases and read the readmes.

The menu remains memory resident, so you don’t have to load it again every time. This makes watching the graphics entries and listening to the music entries much more fun, especially on the real machine.
If you use loadable speeders, you have to use the memory area $500-$5ff.
For “SIO2SD TURBO” for example press “OPTION+START” at the boot screen.

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Mister Hoppe

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Wojciech Bociański (AtariAge user bocianu) has written a new game in MAD Pascal. Entered into the 6502 competition over at AtariOnline, it fits in 6502 bytes so it has no sound. It’s a fun little run and jump game, the source code is available from his GIT repo on GitLab you can download it from the 6502 competition site here’s a (Direct Link) or you can grab a copy here.

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ANTIC Interview 369 – Philip Bouchard, The Oregon Trail

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The latest in the ANTIC Podcast’s interview series is here. This time the interviewee is Philip Bouchard, the principal designer of The Oregon Trail, the most successful educational game of all time and the world’s longest-running video game franchise.

Get it over at the ANTIC Podcast website, or wherever you subscribe to your podcasts. You probably wont get cholera!

Ultimate Atari Video (UAV) available again.

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For a while now it has been near impossible to get a UAV, the best svideo update for the Atari 8bit range. Bryan the guy who designed it has been dealing with real life and fun things like video upgrades have taken a back seat.

Well the good news is that MacRorie at the Brewing Academy has made a deal with Bryan and taken over production of the boards. There will now (well… after Chinese new year) be a place to get these awesome boards.

Head on over to the Brewing Academy website for more info.

LiteDOS2.0 Released

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Mr. Atari has written a new DOS for Atari users, it’s small, only 2K so you have more free memory, boots in only a couple of seconds, compatible with DOS2, 2.5, MyDOS, supports wildcards, has a ESP8266/Rverter R:Driver: for WiFi connection to BBSes etc., an 850 compatible R: driver, a formatter for LitDOS disks and all the most used DOS commands.

Not bad for 2K!

LiteDOS is still in active development, version 2.01 was just released, so go check it out on Mr Ataris website